on the Read Book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a route trip today, one feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried step over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that accept the narrator and his companions past surprise every bit they ride through the North Dakota plains. They register the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Nigh shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last time you lot saw that? The travelers' exposure—to actual hazard, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-twenty-four hours readers, specially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the feel of being fully in the earth, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic comfort.
If such experiences feel less bachelor to u.s.a. now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular fashion of moving through the earth, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator'due south road trip with his son and ii friends as a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in information technology. At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese design among American motorists, and the company'southward founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of "quality" to a quasi-mystical condition, congruent with Pirsig's own efforts in Zen to articulate a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig'south writing conveys his loyalty to this machine, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to piece of work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the same era, the Hondas seemed more than refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an effort to articulate the human being chemical element in mechanical piece of work.)
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorbike maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional exercise it. This posture of not-involvement, we presently learn, is a crucial chemical element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized chip" or "the system," as the couple puts it; technology is a death forcefulness, and the betoken of striking the road is to get out it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at engineering science is to "Accept information technology somewhere else. Don't take it here." The irony is they still find themselves entangled with The Machine—the one they sit on.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A narration of a summer motorbike trip undertaken by a father and his son, the book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to alive. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful cocky-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely cute process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism
Today, we often use "technology" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offer no apparent friction between the self and the world, no need to master the grubby details of their functioning. The manufacture of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the deject—it all takes place "somewhere else," just as John and Sylvia wished.
Yet lately nosotros have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech now orders everyday life more deeply than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "get abroad from it all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral data and used to nudge us into profitable channels, likely without our even knowing it.
We don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, as he refrained from most interviews after publishing a 2nd novel, Lila, in 1991. But his narrator has left us a mode out that can be reclaimed by anyone venturesome enough to endeavour it: He patiently attends to his own motorcycle, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to empathize it. His way of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to get our hands dirty, to be self-reliant. In Zen, we see a man maintaining direct appointment with the world of material objects, and with it some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/
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